Sunday, September 03, 2017

aljazeera |The distinguished novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Tony Morrison has keenly observed:
"All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want
to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to
their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order
to emphasize their whiteness."

But the question is not fealty to any "native
country". The question is rather the systematic subordination of all
immigrants, regardless of how they have been colour-coded, to the myth
of the "white people" and the violent fantasies of their civilizing
missions. No brown, black, or any other thus coloured person can ever be
completely "white". But their trying to pass as white is a mechanism of
humiliation and denigration they willingly play to presume they are
part of the power structure and a more "normal" human being.

In How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in
America (1998), Karen Brodkin has put forward one line of argument as to
how since World War II American Jews began to pose and perform
themselves as "white". The practice is not peculiar to American Jews, of
course. Upon their arrivals and one generation into a successful
economic status, other recent immigrants, Muslims and Hindus alike, have
also sought to posit and pass themselves as (almost) white.

Becoming white has always been the most potent way
for racialised "minorities" to overcome their violently alienated
personhood in order to become something they could (and should) never
be.

By replicating and reenacting the racial politics
of their European origin and now their US benefactors upon Arabs in
general and the Palestinians in particular, the Zionists are the living
testimonials as to how racial hatred is manufactured and sustained as
means of political domination. The term "Israeli Arab" invented by
Zionists for Palestinians in their own homeland is the epitome of
European racism carried to its most obscene colonial conclusions.

Struggle for racial justice must commence and
continue with the full knowledge of how racial divides were socially
manufactured and politically sustained before we can learn how to
overcome them. The full acknowledgment of the murderous history of racism
in the US and Europe is the first step towards dismantling it. No
postmodern or poststructuralist dismantling of race can disregard the
sustained history of racism as coterminous with capitalist modernity. It
must acknowledge, sublate, in order to overcome it.